Craig Murray has been threatened with court action if he posts government documents on his website. Treasury Solicitors are claiming that he will be guilty of breaching Crown Copyright if he fails to remove them by the end of tomorrow.
It appears the Government is tightening up its rules and regulations more generally on FOI requests. If you look at THIS letter from the Department of Transport, published under an FOI yesterday it contains this paragraph at the end...
The information supplied to you continues to be protected by the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988. You are free to use it for your own purposes, including any noncommercial
research you are doing and for the purposes of news reporting. Any other reuse,
for example commercial publication, would require the permission of the copyright
holder. Most documents supplied by the Department for Transport will have been
produced by government officials and will be Crown Copyright.
Why is this newsworthy? Because I'm told that paragraph has not been used by the DFT in FOI requests before. Is this right? I ask the question because I've only had this from one source. If it is indeed true it basically means that anything I, as a blogger, get from the Government under FOI rules I am prevented from republishing - and I assume this applies to newspapers too. If so, it makes you wonder why they ever bothered with an FOI Act in the first place.
Am I missing something?
7 comments:
If it is indeed true it basically means that anything I, as a blogger, get from the Government under FOI rules I am prevented from republishing - and I assume this applies to newspapers too.
I think you forgot to read what you quoted...
You are free to use it for your own purposes, including any noncommercial research you are doing and for the purposes of news reporting.
In my view, that would allow you to publish newsworthy information, but if you're just trying to make money of the back of FoI sourced documents you'd be breaching copyright.
Copyright law is extremely complicated and there are lots of circumstances where material that is copyrighted may be published without permission. Reporting the news is one; fair dealing for the purposes of criticism or review is another.
mike nolan: "..but if you're just trying to make money of the back of FoI sourced documents you'd be breaching copyright"
It means a lot more than that. Craig Murray was providing his FOI and DPA documents FOC on his site. No financial gain involved. HMG made it crystal clear he would be prosecuted if they were not removed. Their purpose of course is arbitrary and political - they don't want anyone to see those documents. Nothing to do with Crown Copyright but that was their last resort. He has to day removed them. More on my Blogg + the major parts of the comments section of Iains earlier post if Helen or anon are inclined to continue with that exchange.
Anon 5.08. But the problem is, a publicly funded copyright holder and particularly HM Treasury who can simply print money) decide to prosecute, you're going to need pretty deep pockets yourself if you want to contest the matter. In other words 'you can have your 'Freedom of information' unless, on second thoughts, we decide we don't want it publicly available after all..
Presumably , when say the Guradian get a document under fOI and use it as the basis of a story - let's say concerning Suez, which we invaded in collusion with the Israelis and the French just 50 years ago this week,they have a fundamentally commercial use.... they do it to sell newspapers and to make money ....
The absurdity is, the bone heads have unleashed a tsunami of copies, stashes, mirrors worldwide of what they were trying to suppress.
Q. By publicising the caveat are you in breach of Copyright ?
WARNING - when you have read this comment, please eat it.
Noncommercial research surely includes sharing relevant extracts of the the information in a forum of peers, for their criticism and peer review?
http://www.d-log.info/
I've filed lots of FOI requests, and that is more or less a standard paragraph in the response form letter.
People who follow the UK FOI regime closely have been warning about a clash with Crown Copyright for some time. It's very different in the US, where public documents are, well, public and not subject to copyright.
The point of this is supposed to be to protect commercially-useful government data like Ordinance Survey maps from being sold on by requesters.
Murray's documents clearly have no intrinsic value other than as evidence of the government's actions. So this seems to be political.
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